Which resolution is best?

My Dell Inspiron laptop has a native resolution of 1600 x 1050. When Civ first came out, it always crashed at that resolution, so I always played at the lowest graphic settings of 1024 x 680, or whatever. I tried a game on my native resolution, and it works fine now, so my question is, which one is better?

I posted in an earlier thread about how I have a lot of lag in my games, could playing at the wrong resolution cause my video driver to work overtime? On the one hand, playing at the native resolution of 1600 means a lot of work, however, doesn't playing at a non-native resolution mean my computer has to create pixels to fill in the spaces around the lower resolution? Which one would mean less work for my video card?

The LCDs scaler takes care of the non native resolutions so the lower resolution that would give you higher framerates.

Thank you CivDude86.